I read brian_d_foy's journal on the subject of pre-requisites and wanted to make a comment but comments aren't enabled so I'll make them here instead.
First of all I think he is spot on in his comments but I wouldn't necesarily class web applications as end-user. A developer of some sort still has to install them and they're intended for other people to use. User applications reside on the desktop (to all intents and purposes). I am talking about users here in the context of normal people who use computers to get their jobs done. Not us lot who have a somewhat different relationship with the things :)
Now most users in this class use either Windows or Mac OS. In both cases installing an application is as simple as draging-and-dropping (in the Mac case) or running setup.exe (on windows). There is no equivalent in the perl case...
- Install perl
- Install the gui widget library (in C or whatever)
- Install the perl/gui bindings and all the other CPAN modules required
- Install the app
What I really want is something that will take my code, an build me a distribution that includes core perl, only the core modules that I am actually using, the widget library, cpan modules and my code. It doesn't have to be compiled, except when the target is a OS that doesn't traditionally have a compiler (like windows, again).
Does such a thing exist ?
PAR++
tex on 2003-01-22T13:50:58
From http://www.autrijus.org/par-intro/slide002.html
What is PAR (Perl Archive Toolkit)?
- Do what JAR (Java Archive) does for Perl
- Platform-independent, compressed file format (zip)
- Aggregates modules, scripts and other files into one file
- Easy to generate, update and extract
- Benefit of using PAR:
-
Decreased download and deployment time
-
Saves disk space by compression and selective packaging
-
Version consistency: solves forward-compatibility problems
-
You can also turn a PAR file into a self-contained script
-
Bundles all necessary 3rd-party modules with it
-
Requires only core Perl to run on the target machine
-
If you use perlcc to compile the script...
- ...you get an executable not even needing core perl
PAR
Re:PAR++
belg4mit on 2003-01-23T19:45:46
I bookmarked this sometime ago.
However it just occurred to me,
this is a suboptimal name.
http://www.perl.com/language/ppt/src/par/index.html
Perl for the Windows desktop
jplindstrom on 2003-01-22T17:46:52
For Windows you have two solutions besides PAR (which I haven't tried myself): PerlApp and perl2exe.
This is an example of a Perl-program-as-exe:
http://www.bahnhof.se/user/johanl/perl/Oasis/ In addition to the program-in-one-file you also probably need an installer. A good one is InnoSetup, or the one from the WinAmp guys.
